The first time Purdy Eaton visited Sharon, Connecticut, she’d come to see a friend - on what turned out to be “a brutally cold February weekend,” she says. Despite the weather, Purdy, an artist whose work is shown in galleries across the country, was smitten the town of about 2700, situated just east of the New York border. To her, Sharon offered “all the good things of a small town - friendly people and access to nature,” plus an easy commute from New York City, where she and her husband, Josh, who runs an investment firm, live in a Tribeca apartment with their children, Sawyer, 14 and Huxley, 11. By the weekend’s end, she’d decided to book a place in town for the summer.
Read MoreHung Liu’s life story unfolded like the myths she loved as a child, tales of women propelled by circumstance out of their homes and into the fray of history. Hoping to escape the rising Communist forces as they took over China’s countryside, her family fled to Beijing, only to be exiled back to a remote area; later, she would move to the United States, living in various cities along the California coast, where she began studying and making art. By the time her name was well known, she had perfected her distinct type of painted portraiture, featuring people who had been left behind, both in China and beyond.
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![National Portrait Gallery: Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands]()
Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands
August 27, 2021 - May 30, 2022
The story of America as a destination for the homeless and hungry of the world is not only a myth. It is a story of desperation, of sadness, of uncertainty, of leaving your home. It is also a story of determination, and—more than anything—of hope.
— Hung Liu, 2017
Hung Liu (1948–2021) was a contemporary Chinese-born American artist, whose multilayered paintings established new frameworks for understanding portraiture in relation to time, memory, and history. Often sourcing her subjects from photographs, Liu elevated overlooked individuals by amplifying the stories of those who have historically been invisible or unheard. Having lived through war, political revolution, exile, and displacement, she offered a complex picture of an Asian Pacific American experience. Her portraits speak powerfully to those seeking a better life, in the United States and elsewhere. Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands will be first major exhibition of the artist's work on the East Coast. This is also the first time that a museum will focus on Liu’s portraiture.
Read MoreWe spoke with the artist, in one of her last interviews, about the messages in her striking figurative works, which will be featured in a posthumous show at the National Portrait Gallery.
BY MARLENA DONOHUE
Chinese-born, Oakland-based HUNG LIU is the first artist of Asian descent to have a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The achievement is bittersweet. The show — titled “Portraits of Promised Lands” and opening August 27 — was to be a celebration of 50 years of work, bringing together 50 of her multilayered figurative drawings, photos, paintings and collages. Instead, it will be a posthumous tribute, as the vibrant 73-year-old Liu passed away on August 7 after a short illness.
Read MoreHung Liu, a Chinese American artist whose work merged past and present, East and West, earning her acclaim in her adopted country and censorship in the land of her birth, died on Aug. 7 at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 73.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which represents Ms. Liu in New York, said in a statement.
Read MoreHung Liu in 1980, when she was a graduate student in Beijing. (Courtesy of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley)
ByEmily Langer
Yesterday at 6:22 p.m. EDT
Hung Liu, a Chinese American artist who elevated the marginalized people of both her homelands — an impoverished mother, a desperate immigrant, an unseen laborer — in massive works of portraiture that transcended national boundaries, died Aug. 7 at a hospital in Oakland, Calif. She was 73.
Read MoreHonoring the Past With Art And Tears
With a style of ‘weeping realism’ often based on photos, California-based Hung Liu evokes the crucible of China’s Cultural Revolution
As a teenager in 1960s China, Hung Liu knew that family photos could be dangerous. During the Cultural Revolution, having an elite or educated family background could lead to prison, and Ms. Liu was the granddaughter of a scholar; worse, her father had fought against the Communists. So family members saved a handful of pictures and burned the rest. Diaries, too, went up in smoke.
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I wanted to share with you a new public project in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Sun on the Edge is a site-specific sculpture commissioned by the City of St. Petersburg for a roundabout in the EDGE District as part of a neighborhood revitalization project.
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